More than one million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury leading to a state of unconsciousness known as a coma. Most are caused by severe head trauma due to traffic accidents or violence and one out of every five-war injuries result in comas. Patients in this state can range from having a great deal of brain function to absolutely none at all, and most people do come out of comas after a few weeks.
A team of scientists from Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have shown how proteins involved in controlling genes work together to carry out their functions in stem cells and demonstrated for the very first time, how they can change interaction partners to make other types of cells. The work highlighted the collaborative nature of modern biology in which techniques and knowledge from bioinformatics analysis, structural biology, biochemistry and stem cell molecular biology were used together to find the specific amino acid within the protein that facilitated the molecular switch between stem cells and other types of cells.
